


Safe Harbor

by reapertownusa



Series: The Past is a Foreign Country [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prostitution, Rape/Non-con References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-05
Updated: 2010-08-05
Packaged: 2017-11-26 18:46:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reapertownusa/pseuds/reapertownusa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After rescuing Dean from an attack, John takes him back to his motel room to recover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe Harbor

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: This part contains vague references to rape. Overall themes of prostitution and father/son incest.

Silence hung between them as John led Dean towards the old motel. It was one of those buildings that could have been named a historical site if the funds were available, but instead had been left to fall to shambles. Just like the rest of the dying seaport.

The route to the motel was lined with bars and there was a hell of a lot of racket spilling out of the cheap dives tonight. Every shout pulled a nervous jump or wary glance from Dean. John strode protectively beside the boy and kept him to the edge of the sidewalk, putting himself between Dean and the few others walking the streets. 

At first John had set a quick pace. All instinct told him to get the injured boy off the dark streets and to a defensible location as quickly as possible. Dean had kept up without complaint. Yet when he really looked, John saw that each step rippled a pained grimace across Dean’s face. John forced himself to slow down. 

Out of the corner of his eye he watched the beaten boy tucked inside his leather jacket. Under the glow of the streetlights Dean’s bloodied face was firmly set with determination. While John admired that, it was the accompanying look of acceptance that he couldn’t tolerate. 

For his part, John was livid at the men who had done this and at himself. Despite his inherent need to take responsibility, he knew this would have happened regardless of whether or not Dean had come to meet him. It just would have happened later when he wasn’t there to stop it. He still should have been there sooner. 

It was impossible for him not to consider that the boy was someone’s son. If this had happened to Sam, he wouldn’t have stopped at cocking the gun. His gut screamed that he shouldn’t have held off tonight either. He had only stopped for Dean, not because the man was human. 

Just human. Dean’s words echoed in his head. It was something Sam would have said. A differentiation John had drilled in, one that fell under the umbrella of ‘do what I say, not what I do’. 

When they arrived at the motel, John silently directed Dean up the outdoor steps to the second floor. He was careful not to rush Dean’s progress up the stairs and remained ready to catch him if he had to. Despite his obvious pain, Dean didn’t falter. 

The boy leaned back against the railing, staring out into the night while John fished the room key from his pocket and pushed the door open for him. There was a slight hesitation before Dean slipped past him into the room. He could only guess what was going through Dean’s head. For all Dean knew, he had just jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. 

After John flipped on the lamp Dean looked around the dingy room then shrugged off the jacket. Given that John had thought the hunt was over, he had taken down all signs of his research last night. There was nothing visible to suggest it was anything but a trashy motel room belonging to a perfectly boring man - 'normal', as Sam liked to say. 

Dean seemed to have forgotten about the room. Instead fixating on a thin smearing of blood that had been rubbed from his cheek onto the collar of John’s jacket. He sent John an apologetic glance before using what was left of his shirt to wipe the blood from the scarred leather. It was hardly the first spot of blood that jacket had seen, but John couldn’t tell Dean as much without sounding suspicious. 

“I’m clean,” Dean said. “Well, I was, and I don’t think those ugly bastards have been getting any.” 

“It’s fine.” 

Taking the jacket back from Dean’s nervous hands, John slung it over the nearest chair. He reached towards Dean to get a better look at the swelling injuries marring his face, but the boy turned his head away before John could make contact. 

Dean’s eyes were still averted as he spoke. “I’m gonna hit the shower.” Even after the announcement, Dean didn’t move. It took John a long moment to realize that the boy was waiting for permission. 

John gave him an evaluating look. “I assume you’re not planning on filing a report.” 

“That a problem?” 

“No, but I want to take a look at you when you get out.” 

There was heavy reluctance in the boy’s eyes when he glanced up at him, but he nodded before looking back down and heading for the bathroom. The lock clicked the instant Dean shut the door. 

John sat on the edge of the bed just listening. There was only a moment of rustling around before the water was turned on. Resting his elbows on his knees, John buried his head in his hands, the full extent of his exhaustion settling into his bones. 

The shower ran long enough that he got up to go check on Dean just as the spray of the water fell silent. There was shuffling sounds before John realized that Dean didn’t have anything to put on. The boy’s shirt was destroyed and his pants were trashed, had been even before the attack. 

John started to dig through his own clothing, but reluctantly dug deeper in his bag to the clothes Sam had left behind. The pants would be ridiculously long on Dean, but the waist would be a better fit. With the clothes in hand, he reached up to knock on the bathroom door only to have it open before his fist could make contact. 

When he saw Dean standing in the doorway the clothing nearly fell from John’s arms. The boy had dried off, his moist, disheveled hair the only sign he’d been in the shower, but he stood without so much as a towel around his waist. His head was bowed, accentuating the strong lines of his shoulders. 

“What are you doing?” John asked. 

“You said you wanted to look me over.” For a moment John glimpsed a flash of defiance, but it nearly instantly gave way to submission. “So do it.” Dean held his arms out in surrender, every line of his body screaming of resignation. 

Slowly John caught on and stepped past Dean to grab a fresh towel off the rack. “Put this on,” he said as he held it out to Dean. 

“Why?” Dean’s tone was suspicious rather than confused. 

“I meant what I said. I want to make sure you’re okay. That’s it.” 

“It’s your room. You can do whatever the hell you want.” 

John wanted to shake some sense into Dean, but instead pressed the towel firmly to the boy’s chest. “Put this on and come sit on the bed.” 

Silently Dean took the towel from him without meeting his eyes. John left Dean to wrap it around himself and headed for the room’s mini fridge. When Dean came out, John handed him a cold beer while John went straight for the whiskey on the bed stand. He would offer Dean the same if he didn’t think the boy was more in need of painkillers than alcohol. 

A wry smirk skirted Dean’s lips as he accepted the bottle and settled down on the edge of the bed. “At least I got my beer.” 

When Dean tipped his head back to drink, John finally got a clear look at the boy’s face and crouched down in front of him. This time when he reached out Dean stopped himself short of turning his head away. John’s fingers touched lightly against the split skin on Dean’s cheekbones to make sure the cut was shallow enough to heal on its own. 

While the blood had been washed clean, that only highlighted that the pavement had scraped the skin of Dean’s right cheek raw. The left side was swollen and coloring from the fists that had been taken to it. John remembered the perfection he had seen in those now brutalized cheeks and wished all over again that he had pulled the trigger. He needed some air. 

“I’m going to get some ice for that,” John said as he stood. 

Before he could walk away, Dean grabbed the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s been too long for it to do any good. Just stay.” 

The green eyes that earnestly met his glistened with held back tears and the expression that accompanied them was one that John could not have possibly denied. “It’s okay,” he replied as he crouched back down in front of Dean. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

Looking down from Dean’s face, John’s brow furrowed. The pristinely pale skin was mottled with deep red blotches, some that John recognized as having come from a fist, others from a boot. He’d expected that, but his hand hovered over a pentacle sigil tattooed over Dean’s heart. While he couldn’t place it, he'd seen the design somewhere before. 

“What’s this?” 

Dean looked down at it and shrugged. “My prison tat.” 

“That's some nice work for a prison job.” 

“Yeah, well, Big Bubba was a hell of an artist.” 

John raised his brows skeptically, but still couldn’t stop himself from pushing. “What’s it mean?” 

“It doesn’t mean jack shit. I’ve got some stuff to cover it up if it’s a problem.” 

“It’s not.” Letting it drop, John moved on to probe his fingers over Dean’s side. Dean gritted his teeth as John pressed over some of the more colorful areas. “Do you think anything’s broken?” 

“No. Just flesh wounds,” Dean replied, despite hissing at the applied pressure. “Don’t worry about it.” 

Whether or not Dean was telling the truth, John believed that the boy knew the difference between broken and bruised ribs. When he let himself see past the obvious new injuries he noted the layers of scars that laced the boy’s skin. Most were subtle and faded while a few others he couldn’t even guess the cause of. 

“Wanna switch places?” Dean asked. 

John noticed how uncomfortable Dean had grown under the scrutiny, but the question didn’t register. If it were possible, he would trade places with the boy in a heartbeat and take Dean's injuries on himself. Yet he knew that wasn’t what Dean was asking. His confusion must have been obvious because Dean rephrased his question. 

“Want me on the floor?” 

Standing back up, John handed Dean the clothes. “Get dressed.” 

“You’re a demanding son of a bitch.” 

John couldn’t decipher whether the tone was more sarcastic or amused. Either way Dean accepted the clothes. For a moment the boy held them in his lap, staring down at them as he ran his hand over the folded jeans. His mouth opened to speak but closed a moment later. 

Though no words left Dean’s split lips John could read the silent appreciation. The look the boy was wearing was one John himself had worn on more than a few occasions when he’d known he’d needed the help, and had been grateful for it, but had been too proud to say as much. 

Dean looked overwhelmed as if everything had just caught up with him. “You don’t have to do this.” He set the clothes beside him on the bed. “You get that I can’t pay you, right? I mean, I’ll do anything you want, but….” 

“I don’t want anything.” 

Dean scoffed. “Bullshit. Everybody wants something.” 

“I just want to make sure you’re okay.” 

“Man, you are something else, you know that?” Dean said with a shake of his head. 

By the looks of it Dean still didn’t believe him, but was too tired to argue. Pulling the clothes into his arm, Dean stood from the bed. He walked past John to the bathroom and set his beer on the counter. The boy didn’t bother to shut the door before letting the towel slip from his waist. 

John had apparently lost all sense of decency and didn’t look away as Dean slowly stepped into Sam’s jeans. He took another gulp from his whiskey and noticed for the first time that Dean was completely shaved. It only made him look all the younger, which was likely no accident, but was enough to again make John wonder if he had lost his mind. 

“What the hell?” Dean muttered. The jeans barely clung low to Dean’s hips, but even as he pulled them to his waistline the pant legs remained pooled over his feet. “Dude, did you steal these pants from sasquatch?” 

“My son.” Dean froze, meeting John’s eyes with an unreadable expression. “They’re my son’s.” 

After a moment Dean’s shoulders relaxed. He reached down to grab his old jeans. His fingers clumsily worked the belt from them. 

“Your son...” Dean kept his head lowered as he weaved the worn belt through the loops of Sam’s jeans. “You two must be pretty close for you to be carrying around his pants.” 

“We were.” John again took a seat on the end of the bed, looking down to the floor before shaking his head. As much as the truth hurt, it hurt more to pretend. “Not anymore.” 

Dean shifted uneasily, but said nothing as he synched the belt at his waist and slipped on the baggy hooded sweatshirt. 

“What about you?” John asked a moment later. 

It wasn’t any of his business and meddling in other people’s lives wasn’t his thing. Normally he just saved their lives and moved on, but this was different. Tomorrow he needed to return to the hunt, which meant turning Dean back out onto the street. The boy should be in a hospital. At the least Dean needed a roof over his head while he healed, but John already knew the boy wouldn’t accept his money for a motel room. 

Placing a foot up on the rim of the bathtub, Dean busied himself with rolling up the pant legs of the jeans. “Don’t got any sons that I know of.” 

“Do you have any other family?” 

It was plenty obvious that if Dean had anywhere else to be, he’d be there. Still, thinking there was someone he could drop the kid off with would help to ease the guilt suffocating John. In a perfect world the boy would have family or friends in the next town over. In that perfect world John would still have two sons and a beautiful wife. 

The room fell into silence as Dean finished with the pants. He had rolled them up only slightly, still letting them fall over his bare feet. It wasn’t surprising considering that John had caught a brief glimpse of Dean fastening some kind of weapon holster to his ankle. 

He hadn’t seen what kind and had no intention of asking. After the night he’d had, the boy had every right to a token piece of protection. It was only fair considering that John was armed to the gills and well enough trained not to need a weapon. 

What seemed out of place was that the boy hadn’t tried to use the weapon during the attack. John was also uncertain that even he could have slipped something like that on in plain view. Not once had John looked away from Dean while he was dressing yet John had all but missed a boy barely ten feet in front of him smuggling a weapon from one pair of pants to the next. He needed to get some sleep. 

Swiping the beer from the bathroom counter, Dean brought it to his lips and went a long way towards emptying it. “Look,” Dean said after he again set the bottle aside, “I appreciate everything you’re doing, I really do, but I’m not the sharing type.” 

That much John could understand. He let Dean silently go about what he was doing until he realized what Dean was doing was cleaning up the bathroom. “You don’t have to do that.” 

Standing from the bed, John joined Dean only to have the boy wave him off. “I got it.” 

Dean stubbornly squared his shoulders and waited for John to back off before returning to folding the towels he had used and laying them over the edge of the tub. He set his worn boots in the small closet along with his balled up jeans that were obviously destined for the trash with the torn shirt wrapped inside them. John hated that the boy was familiar enough with this sort of thing to not just dump the bloody shirt in the room’s trash bin. 

“I’m ready for this day to be over,” Dean said. 

His movements were stiff as he shuffled back out into the main room. John wasn’t sure how much of that was pain from the attack and how much was muscle exhaustion from Dean busting his ass at the dock. Any other man, even one as young as Dean, would have broken from either one. Dean had taken both without complaint. 

“I mean, unless you wanted something...” Dean corrected with a glance towards John. Sighing, John forced himself to only shake his head and save the parental lecture that was at the tip of his tongue. Dean nodded, looking down to at the lightly stained carpet. “Okay then. Night.” 

At first John was too baffled to say anything as Dean walked behind the small table and lowered himself to the floor in the corner of the room. John ducked his head enough to see beneath the table where Dean squirmed uncomfortably before he nestled against the wall and pulled the hood of the sweatshirt down over his eyes. John didn’t want to consider how many times someone had to sleep on the floor to make it look that natural. 

There was no way to keep the stunned disbelief from his voice. “You’re not sleeping down there.” 

Starling slightly, Dean pulled back the hood just enough to glance up at John. “You won't even know I’m here.” He didn’t understand the pleading look in Dean’s eyes until Dean sent a distasteful glare towards the table. “Please. I don’t think I can handle these chairs.” 

Understanding hit John a moment before the revival of his rage took over. What was likely Dean’s most painful injury was the one that John had no right to examine. And Dean thought that he expected the boy to spend all night sitting on it in a hardwood chair. 

“Get in the bed,” John ordered. 

Dean looked unimpressed, losing himself in thought before replying. “I’ll lay down if you will.” 

That wasn’t happening. Under no circumstance was he going to ask a boy that had just been gang raped to share a bed with a strange man, even if that strange man was himself. 

“I’m fine with the chair. I got work to do.” 

With an equal stubbornness in his tired eyes, Dean remained firmly planted on the floor. “I promise I won’t hog the covers.” 

“I’m not going to make you...” 

“I know.” 

Grunting as he stood, Dean moved towards him with a trace of the sauntering stride that had sealed the deal last night. He stopped well within John’s reach. 

“You’re not gonna arrest or kill me.” Dean stripped the sweatshirt off, folding it carefully before locking eyes with John. “And you can’t rape me.” Turning away, Dean moved on to set the shirt beside the bed. 

“You’re that sure you could stop me?” John was genuinely curious if only because he didn’t know where Dean’s sudden certainty was coming from. 

“No, but you can’t steal what’s already yours.” 

Dean peeled back the covers. The mattress shifted beneath John as Dean climbed in, stretching out over the sheets. John looked over his shoulder. His eyes became lost traveling over Dean’s upper torso. Even broken, the boy was beautiful. Finally his gaze made it up to Dean’s strangely trusting eyes. 

“Just so we’re clear - you want it, it’s yours,” Dean said with a gesture towards himself. The boy’s expression turned disapproving after a glance over his own battered skin. “For what it’s worth.” 

The apparent self-assurance again dissolved into uncertainty as Dean pulled the sheets up over himself. John couldn’t understand how a boy could come to view his body as a commodity. While Dean’s hand absently traced over the wrinkles in the sheets, he quietly answered John’s silent question. 

“I’m sorry,” Dean said. “It’s all I got to give.” 

“Stop apologizing.” John walked around to sit on the other side of the bed. If laying down with the boy was the only thing that was going to keep Dean in the bed then so be it. “You haven’t done anything wrong.” 

Those long lashes shielded Dean’s eyes. “You don’t owe me, or any other needy son of a bitch, anything,” John added. He tipped Dean’s chin up and the boy slowly raised his eyes. “But for the record, anyone would be a damn fool not to take you up on the offer.” His hand pulled away and he did his best to ignore the disappointment in Dean’s eyes. “Just get some rest.” 

John kicked off his boots, but left his clothes on as he turned off the lamp and slipped beneath the sheets. Seemingly satisfied, Dean tried to find a comfortable position on the bed. The way Dean’s body needed to lay didn’t seem to match the way the tender skin of his face needed to be positioned on the pillow. 

After again apologizing for the squeaky springs of the mattress, Dean gave up and laid on his side with his arms wrapped tightly around himself. Despite common sense telling him to just let the boy be, John was only able to stare at the tensed muscles of Dean’s bruised back for a minute before reaching out to him. 

His hand set tentatively on Dean’s shoulder. The boy wordlessly scooted closer to John, seeking out the physical contact. John soothingly rubbed his hand along Dean’s bicep, just as he had so many times before with Mary. 

He had been trying so hard to avoid taking advantage that he hadn’t stopped to consider Dean’s perspective. For Dean his refusals were likely interpreted as rejecting, not respecting, him. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was too late for a lot of things, but he could still correct that faulty assumption. 

Also scooting closer, John met Dean in the middle of the bed. Dean pressed his back against him while John’s arm came to fully encircle the boy, just holding him. It wasn’t long before John could hear the quietly hitched breaths and feel the subtle quaking of Dean’s shoulders. 

Of all things, John’s memory flashed to the bitterly cold January morning when he and Mary had first brought his Dean home from the hospital. Until the night Mary had died, John had been sure there was no terror in the world so great as being handed that fragile bundle, wide eyed and trusting, completely dependent on him for protection. John had never so brutally failed anything. 

“I’m so sorry, Dean,” he whispered against the boy’s neck. 

It didn’t matter that the words were meant for another boy. In part, they were meant for this one too. Dean’s arm moved to cover John’s, clutching it tightly as if there was a way to draw their already flush bodies closer together. 

John had long ago given up on believing in anything aside from random chance. Yet he couldn’t help but feel that he was being given a second chance now. The thought terrified him. He’d let his wife die, lost his eldest son and chased off his youngest.

There was nothing he had to offer the silently crying boy spooned against him. He felt that old fear of holding a life in his arms and having no damn clue what to do with it. The fear was only tempered by the determination not to screw it up this time around.


End file.
